Being a woman does not necessarily imply that one is disempowered. The basis of my analysis provides the opportunity to distinguish two components that have often been confused and confused. With this challenge in mind, I scrutinized and probed educational management as a construction of gender. At the same time, how could gender be understood as power? Because power can be problematic for women, I augmented the model of four social relationships of power with oneself and with others. The improved model is constituted as difference and power relations as central factors to be examined in a gender construction of educational management.

Given the gendered construction of educational management, the contradictions in this alternative image of leader were not surprising. While the leader as mother highlighted women’s work in caring for children, nurturing, and caring for others, the representation of the mother in a home setting implied that she was out of place if she was out of the family. her home. The metaphor reinforced the inappropriate nature of motherhood in management and leadership. When considering the opposite for “mother”, the legitimacy of a father figure prevailed over alternatives such as a single or unmarried father.

The second metaphor specified a gender-neutral image, leader as visionary, with women and men as equally likely candidates for such a position. The use of the model and its components facilitated a more detailed examination of the gender aspects that could distinguish a visionary woman from a man. For women and minorities, the metaphor suggests new possibilities for those not normally thought of as leaders or in leadership roles because one can become a leader by virtue of her vision. One can assume or claim power over others by one’s visionary direction. However, there can be an ongoing struggle to retain one’s position and maintain one’s legitimacy, especially in modes of power more commonly associated with men, such as power over others and personal power.

The combination of model and metaphor as an analysis tool is useful because the combination of these devices makes it necessary to examine management and educational leadership with women at the center and not on the periphery of the construction.

This is achieved by examining gender difference as separate from but interrelated with power. Furthermore, by combining model and metaphor, the user is forced to scrutinize what might be taken for granted by juxtaposing something outside the realm of leadership, such as motherhood and visionaries. In this way, the analytical device achieved through the combination of model and metaphor advances feminist scholarship, allowing women to be studied on their own terms with their activities and experiences as the focus or activity, rather than taken as subservient. or deficient.

Given the importance of understanding and interpreting women’s leadership, I think we need to be attentive to the complexity of gender in at least three key ways.

First, using more refined analytical devices, we can start empirical investigations on specific cases and examine how gender biases actually occur. I recommend that biographies of men and women be investigated to determine how constructions of gender operate within specific cultural representations. Additionally, by incorporating narrative and text analyzes alongside lived experiences, researchers could further explore conceptualizations of leadership and management. Such research would capture different aspects of leadership, such as making sense, solving problems, and politicizing.

Second, beyond individual case studies, we must attend to established and sustained institutional norms and processes in the preparation and practice of educational administrators. Greater scrutiny is possible of the channel through which school administrators, both women and men, are educated and socialized into their profession. With more discriminating analytical devices, we can examine how women and minorities access leadership positions and beyond that, what we expect of them, how we conceptualize their roles as educational leaders, and how we judge their performance against particular ideals. We can proceed to decipher gender-related differences interwoven with categories of class, race, and ethnicity, as well as confounded by issues of power and authority.

Third, we must pay attention to the conceptualization of gender as confounded by socioeconomic, cultural, and situational contexts. A theoretical lens provides the ability to investigate a particular construct or concept and propose its relationship to others. Such a lens proves itself when applied to the complexity of real-life situations. Both gender and leadership play out differently and dynamically in the lives of educators in schools and school systems across the country. As we refine our theory of gender and leadership, and apply these analytical devices to real situations, we will be better able to suggest and incorporate alternative styles of leadership and educational management.